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Debate II: Lord of the Ring-Binders
(yeah, a little late, but the London Review of Books moves a little slower. I think it's a good summary of the big problems with Romney)
Mitt knows what it takes, but he isn’t sharing. Once he gets elected, he’ll tell us, he says, how he’s going to cut taxes by $5 trillion, add $2 trillion to the military budget, and balance the budget while still having some sort of federal government, besides the Pentagon, left to run. He’ll tell us how he’s going to create 12 million jobs, even though he believes, as he said at the debate: ‘Government does not create jobs. Government does not create jobs.’
(A pause for fact-checking, a tedious necessity throughout the Tales of Mitt. The Bureau of Labor Statistics categorises about 22 million Americans as ‘government workers’, nearly 20 per cent of all jobs. This does not include the millions of private sector jobs that depend on federal grants or that result because of government programmes. [A construction worker on a bridge project is obviously not a government worker.] About a million of the currently unemployed are former government employees, laid off mainly by state and local governments. Most economists agree that, regardless of who is president, at least 12 million jobs will be added in the next four years.)
Mitt isn’t sharing, because Mitt is the Boss. He is the familiar figure of the nightmare boss, the one you have to smile at when he insults you – as Latinos, auto workers and elderly ladies with specially baked cookies have learned. He’s the one who cannot be told that it is difficult to follow his orders because yesterday he said the opposite of what he is saying today – as has become obvious to Paul Ryan and various surrogates. He is the boss who makes his own rules. (Other candidates may release their tax returns, but why should he?) He is the boss who cannot be interrupted, even by the president of the United States. (‘You’ll get your chance in a moment. I’m still speaking.’) But he is not merely the boss in a Frank Capra movie – the one who lays off the employee with the sick kid the week before Christmas. He’s the boss in the age of leveraged buyouts, the one who closes down whole factories and businesses, and gloats like Scrooge McDuck over his bags marked with dollar signs. (Scrooge, at least, had the rascally nephews to puncture his pomposity. Mitt has his five cloned sons, one of whom, Tagg, later said that during the debate he wanted to jump out of his seat, ‘rush down to the stage and take a swing at’ Obama. ‘But you know you can’t do that because, well, first because there’s a lot of Secret Service between you and him.’)
Mitt’s years as the Bain of Capitalists, he believes – and millions of voters bizarrely believe – qualify him to be Leader of the Free World, though one wonders how he is going to break up the United States and sell off the less profitable regions to China. He has two other qualifications that he continually reiterates. He was once an elected official, having served a term as governor of Massachusetts, back when he was briefly Moderate Mitt, before becoming ‘severely’ conservative. (His constituents have such fond memories of him that they now overwhelmingly support Obama.) And he successfully oversaw the 2002 Winter Olympics, thanks to a $1.5 billion bailout from the federal government. This latter accomplishment is a puzzling endorsement: if organising a spectacle is presidential, then James Cameron is better qualified – producing Avatar and Titanic was far more complex than juggling schedules of ski jumps and curling.
...
http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2012/10/19/eliot-weinberger/debate-ii-lord-of-the-ring-binders/
(A pause for fact-checking, a tedious necessity throughout the Tales of Mitt. The Bureau of Labor Statistics categorises about 22 million Americans as ‘government workers’, nearly 20 per cent of all jobs. This does not include the millions of private sector jobs that depend on federal grants or that result because of government programmes. [A construction worker on a bridge project is obviously not a government worker.] About a million of the currently unemployed are former government employees, laid off mainly by state and local governments. Most economists agree that, regardless of who is president, at least 12 million jobs will be added in the next four years.)
Mitt isn’t sharing, because Mitt is the Boss. He is the familiar figure of the nightmare boss, the one you have to smile at when he insults you – as Latinos, auto workers and elderly ladies with specially baked cookies have learned. He’s the one who cannot be told that it is difficult to follow his orders because yesterday he said the opposite of what he is saying today – as has become obvious to Paul Ryan and various surrogates. He is the boss who makes his own rules. (Other candidates may release their tax returns, but why should he?) He is the boss who cannot be interrupted, even by the president of the United States. (‘You’ll get your chance in a moment. I’m still speaking.’) But he is not merely the boss in a Frank Capra movie – the one who lays off the employee with the sick kid the week before Christmas. He’s the boss in the age of leveraged buyouts, the one who closes down whole factories and businesses, and gloats like Scrooge McDuck over his bags marked with dollar signs. (Scrooge, at least, had the rascally nephews to puncture his pomposity. Mitt has his five cloned sons, one of whom, Tagg, later said that during the debate he wanted to jump out of his seat, ‘rush down to the stage and take a swing at’ Obama. ‘But you know you can’t do that because, well, first because there’s a lot of Secret Service between you and him.’)
Mitt’s years as the Bain of Capitalists, he believes – and millions of voters bizarrely believe – qualify him to be Leader of the Free World, though one wonders how he is going to break up the United States and sell off the less profitable regions to China. He has two other qualifications that he continually reiterates. He was once an elected official, having served a term as governor of Massachusetts, back when he was briefly Moderate Mitt, before becoming ‘severely’ conservative. (His constituents have such fond memories of him that they now overwhelmingly support Obama.) And he successfully oversaw the 2002 Winter Olympics, thanks to a $1.5 billion bailout from the federal government. This latter accomplishment is a puzzling endorsement: if organising a spectacle is presidential, then James Cameron is better qualified – producing Avatar and Titanic was far more complex than juggling schedules of ski jumps and curling.
...
http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2012/10/19/eliot-weinberger/debate-ii-lord-of-the-ring-binders/
3 replies
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